The objectives of this activity are to reduce radiation shielding mass through a system that efficiently supports collaborative industry and instrument provider shielding analyses, providing configuration controlled geometry and shielding data, reliable interfaces with company (prime and unit provider) processes, and high speed validated physics simulation, implementable on low cost scalable computing resources.

The shielding mass allocation on high radiation environment missions (e.g. JUICE) can be reduced by the application of full-physics shielding simulations with detailed descriptions of the spacecraft geometry. To deliver savings however, the process has to be deployed across the majority of collaborators from the earliest project phases, through to production and testing. A system will be established in which a design database can be concurrently maintained by collaborating teams and upon which radiation and internal charging effects will be simulated by Monte-Carlo analysis. The activity will extend some prototyped elements of this approach - e.g. the Monte Carlo radiation simulators and exchange protocols, to be efficiently applied in a real project environment. The system will handle progressive detailing of definitions from multiple collaborators and CAE environments. Sectoring shielding methods will be abandoned in favour of Monte Carlo, implemented in a scalable computing environment to allow use of parallel processing and exploitation of evolving computer power access (hardware, clouds, etc.). Full experimental and numerical validation will be performed on the key electron-initiated physics processes, in order to minimise margins. Tools for fixing geometry inconsistencies will be developed and greater focus will be placed on techniques for simulation speed-up, including parallelisation, reverse simulation and biasing. The same energetic electron transport and optimisation issues apply to internal dielectric charging. Since it has been shown to be impractical to use shielding to reduce charging currents below standard limits in the Jovian environment, internal charging analyses are essential. New 3-d internal charging modelling software will be incorporated into the system to ensure that shielding around sensitive dielectrics is adequate but not excessively conservative, given the complex leakage paths in real dielectric structures. The rational calculation of margins, allowing for uncertainty in material characteristics will be investigated. Again, high quality electron experiments will be established for detailed validation.